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Online Storage – Drop Box, Google Drive, Box…

Online Storage – Drop Box, Google Drive, Box…

Online Storage – Drop Box, Google Drive, Box…

We’re massive tech geeks here at Impulse and love most forward thinking technologies.
A year ago, we made the leap to cloud storage for our project management team and have been using dropbox for some time to store all account information. It provides us with simple sharing of files with clients, whilst also offering a great solution when moving from the Macbook Pro’s to iMacs.
Recently we’ve been looking into the options of moving our designers files online, enabling them to work from anywhere in the world, whilst also keeping a solid and reliable workflow. Bearing in mind our WIP file is just shy of 1TB most of the time and our average files are between 100mb & 1GB, we were sceptical as to whether this option would be viable for the guys. We thought we’d share our results and which platforms we looked into.Dedicated server
The first option we tested was a dedicated server. We trialled working with a few projects upon one of our servers to get a feel for how things could be set-up. After a day of testing this became an immediate no go. We may not have set-up in the optimum fashion, but our designers like simple, simple, simple, and this wasn’t all that for them.Google Drive
From the get go, the guys got along with Google Drive much better than a dedicated server. At $10 a month, it’s considerably more cost effective and offers more than enough space for the guys. Things seemed to be going well.
But after a couple of days testing, we found the multi user set-up a little tough to manage. We also found the connection speeds hindered design time considerably in comparison to offline storage. For the smaller files this was a great solution, but not for the bigger 1GB files.Dropbox
With our Project Managers currently working on this platform, we hoped this would be the winner. The sharing functionality and management worked well and the space, cost and back-up functionality of the business solution seemed great. We currently have the same set-up offline, but it cost us thousands to implement.
After a couple of days testing we found the same issue as Google Drive. Network speeds simply aren’t quick enough to cope with the size field we’re working on and we felt this was going to be the issue with all solutions.
We had Adobe’s file storage solution lined up to test along with Box, but without a excellent fibre optic network in place, we don’t think these solutions are going to be for us just yet. Software seems to have considerably overtaken hardware on this front and we’re going to have to wait until we can implement this kind of workflow. We’ll be sticking to the in-house server and scheduled backups for now.
If you’ve found a better solution, please get in touch. We’d love to hear your thoughts.